Jinxed

Jinxed

I didn't subscribe to the lore of the jinx until I married into the superstitious lot that's now my namesake.  I can sense all the wooden door frames and dinner table shudder when one of us is forecasting the future in our house.  Rich is always giving me those incredulous wide eyes of his, simultaneously attempting to neutralize my verbalizations by hammering on all the wood in sight.  And I suppose I should take responsibility for breathing life into these ideas or fears, giving them the opportunity to manifest or not.

There is the more vexing of jinxes which plays out when you confidently brandish a stroke of good fortune aloud and FAIL to knock on wood.  A jinx answers your enthusiasm with a script revision.  It wasn't my fault last week when the spell was was cast. I let the words slip off of my tongue when chatting in the middle of a parking lot with NO WOOD in sight.  If Rich would have been there, he'd have shaken his head.  

While facilitating our weekly produce pick up, a friend to the farm asked how I was doing physically.  And I confidently answered that I was feeling a phenomenal level of energy for January, post-holiday madness.  I sung praises to the fact that I rode through the wild push to end our growing season without my Hashimoto's being unleashed from its cage.

And, well, it's been a week since that conversation and the hex is in full effect, having ignited an auto immune fire, whose flames are fanned by any triggers pulled by the stresses that regular life incurs.  Within a week the familiar feelings of drowsiness, hunger, and complete brain fog bled into slurred words, forgetfulness, and falling asleep in the middle of the day when I sit down and no one needs me for a few minutes.  Is it totally irrational to feel angry toward my thyroid?

It's reality and it's here and writing takes me an ungodly amount of effort.  Stringing words together in a way that the result feels worth reading becomes like a P90x session for my brain.  And my routine winter farm chores feel like an overload of exertion.  These tasks amount to a tasting menu portion compared to the all-you-can-eat buffet of my workload in the upcoming spring.

And so the spiraling has the potential to begin, with the fear of being depleted by the start of our high time and a worsening of symptoms increasing my stress, inhibiting the thyroid function more.  But now that I've seen the cycle come around full circle, I have the experience of rebounding to lean on as proof that my body is capable of bouncing back.

And the thing about jinxes is that I don't actually believe in them.  In fact, since discovering that my thyroid is dysfunctional, I've learned that these flare ups can be extinguished.  It's not all happening because I got too confident in my body functioning, it's happening because a part of my machine vacillates between performing and being tapped out.  I've been in this widdled-down state before; in truth, I've been much more widdled than I am now.  But I've also built myself back up to eventually see the other side: a euphoric return to homeostasis and to that place where I can almost remember what May and Jack are feeling in their youth: boundless energy and vitality.  

In the meantime, maybe since it's January and our field is sleeping, so should I:  give in to the slowness of the season, rest my body, absorb the shocks of stress that are inherent in life, and certainly exclude any of those that I possibly can.  Any day a morning will come when like the soil in spring, I feel all the layers of me burst into a fury of life and heat and commotion and vibrancy.  


Thanks to the generous folks who paid to subscribe to our Foxhole Journal last year, we were able to fund this site for years to come.  More importantly, you all encouraged me to expand on my writing, something which I have now learned to make time for and which I love to do.  Going forward, we are making all publications available for free.  No more pay wall!  If you'd like to contribute still, you can fund my writing by 'buy(ing) me a coffee' any time you'd like.  The button you see below will be at the end of each publication going forward.  Thank you for reading :).